The Value of a Name
by Sentomegami
Summary: PostAWE. SPOILERS. The sea owns everything. It can claim your life, your ship, your heart at any moment it pleases. Only your name belongs to you and you alone. Follows after Occupational Hazards. WillNorrington Willington


_When I was but a boy_

_I came to love the sea._

_The wind would sweep my hair back_

_As Mother never did._

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**The Value of a Name**

--

"…James."

"What?"

The former admiral looks over at him hesitantly before repeating himself. "I want you… I want you to call me by my given name. Not that there's anything wrong with being called Norrington, but it's a mouthful, isn't it? Call me 'James'."

It strikes William Turner then how alone his companion for the past six or seven months has been for his entire life. From what Will can gather from what little he knows of Norrington (James, he mentally corrects himself), the man was always a removed person. Born a street rat, raised as a well-versed naval killer, lived as a man lonely in his rank, and removed from both rough and polite society by his age and reputation; James was a very lonely man. Will had often characterized Elizabeth as a lonely person, her flights of fancy and strange strength for a woman setting her apart from those around her, and he himself had for years been dreadfully lonely, an orphan in love with things he could not have.

So Will steps forward precisely because he knows what it means for a seaman to give another seaman his Christian name, the one possession no one—not even the sea—may steal from an unwilling bounty. They are, after all, in the captain's quarters, and no one enters without Will's permission from the beginning. He offers James comfort.

At first, of course, James resists. It would have been wrong, somehow, if he had accepted the motions from the beginning. James was, for all his occasionally cold and arrogant show, a young man, still tinged slightly by idealism and a sense of right or wrong. But here is something Will is more skilled at; after all, orphans must find means to get food and money, and Will had never been an accomplished thief. James, on the other hand, stole ships and through ranks, a different sort of seducer with his hands to wood and pen not totally unlike Will's to flesh and heat.

Still, though, it surprises Will when James shudders under the first touch of skin to skin, Will's fingers ghosting over the open collar of James's vest. Will draws back, suddenly unsure, and looks into the sea-coloured eyes, at the emotions there in those wide-open windows to the very soul. There is fear there, fear that when this tryst is over the old loneliness will once again return, that they will part expecting nothing more of each other, all six months culminating to one moment of fulfillment before returning to emptiness.

"What do you want, James?" Will asks softly, kneeling between his companion's legs and running his hands in soothing circles above the man's hips. "Why have you given me your name?"

"Because…" James flounders and Will steadies him with his slow, sure, blacksmith hands. "You are the last person to whom it should matter. You keep me here as… as a court jester, a drinking companion at best. I'm bound here, my soul killed on this ship and secured to it just as surely as my blood stained its deck. You should hate me because I should remind you of another life, that one moment your very heart yearns always for, and yet you keep me here… like I'm worth something. But, oh, what am I saying? Of course not. You would not want me. Not like this."

And Will agrees, "No, I do not want you like this. I want you as a friend, as only one lonely soul can want another."

"And is that why you keep me here, why you don't just send another piece of the past away? I've seen you do it to everyone else; I'm the only one that you've kept."

It is something that only action can explain. So, without anymore hesitation, Will rises to his feet, takes the tanned face and threads his fingers through the dark honey brown tresses, and places his lips firmly over the slightly paler (for James _is_, after all, still quite dead) lips. There is no pulse in the kiss for neither have a heart to give the other, but Will feels the reaching from the depths of the soul, feels James's hands respond, gripping tightly as a desperate man would to a floating bit of wood onto Will's shirt sleeves.

"I won't send you away," Will says with a furiousness that shocks himself as he draws back to struggle out of his shirt and increasingly restrictive breeches.

James stares at him with a dazed sort of smile before he begins to mimic his captain's motions, easing himself into a submissive position on the floor of the cabin before Will practically throws himself atop him. As Will runs his fingers over the bronze skin and James responds to the heat that Will commands there with an arching moan, it seems that there is nothing but the two of them, their impending union, and absolute togetherness in this previously lonely world.

"I won't send you away, James," Will says again as he savages the welcoming body. "No one ever should have to be alone, not when they once knew what it meant to have someone else, even once. That's too cruel, and I won't have it."

And James catches Will's lips in a gasping kiss, a just kiss, one hard won by an unforgiving life and unfulfilling death. "Not you…" he moans, "and nor I."


End file.
